The Hubble Space Telescope has taken a 19-hour snapshot of galaxies whose images have been warped by the presence of the baffling interstellar substance known as "dark matter", residing in an intervening galactic cluster.
The image, released Thursday, shows the cluster – known prosaically as MACS J1206.2-0847, or simply MACS …

Fantastic image. The people demand more.

> in the current US political climate, its multi-billion-dollar price tag makes it a prime target...

Sod that!

I hear Eric "Fast And Furious" Holder is currently busy stoking the propaganda machine for action against Iran with bad plot devices. Just in time to divert the restless people at home. Don't tell me there isn't space for a few more "billions and billions" (excuses to Carl Sagan) in the Fed's RDBMS.

@D.A.M

The ITelescope

Maybe the can get Apple to sponsor the new telescope. Perhaps create an app which streams video content from the telescope to billions and billions (I think Carl Sagan and Steve Jobs were related) of IPhone users.

An being that today (14 October) is the official/unofficial Steve Jobs Day...

Dark matter

does not, as the article claims, make up >90% of the universe - that's the figure for dark matter and dark 'energy' combined. Dark matter is estimated to make up 23% of the universe - still 5 times as much as ordinary baryonic matter.

Other universes impinging on our space/time

At that distance they've probably already impinged and it's too late. We're all doomed to invasion from the hordes of Zen and need to call in the Industrial Military Complex to study this in greater detail, starting with funding the telescope.

matter matters

@Chris Miller

The statement was not that it made up 90% of the universe, but 90% of the matter in the universe. That statement is correct.

The total universe, or rather the energy in the universe is made up to ~ 75% of dark energy. That leaves ~25% for matter. Out of those ~25%, ~23% are dark matter. This means that ~92% of all matter dark matter. Exactly what was said in the article.

matter *does* matter

If you want to speak of the total mass/energy of the universe, normal matter makes up slightly less than 5%. If you want to exclude dark energy, then dark matter is about 5/6 of the universe. So in either case, the article is incorrect, and I stand by my comment.

This is my thought also.

In string theory, gravity is not confined to a single universe but is allowed to range through the 'bulk' between universes. The past and the future are special cases of multiple universes, and there is a range of universes encompassing every possibility that has come out of quantum results in the past. As time goes on, you would expect the gravitational effect of 'dark matter' (gravity from other universes) to increase as the number of resulting universes increases. This should be falsifiable.

Depressing...

Spot the duplicates

It's just a pity that an image wasn't produced that actually identified some of the "47 multiple images of 12 newly identified distant galaxies". I can see objects that appear to be the same, but I'm no expert and one galaxy can look pretty much the same as another.

A few helpful annotations would have made this picture even more awesome.